Opening: Monday, 27 January 2025, 7 p.m.
Opening speech: Antonia Birnbaum
Finissage & Artist talk: Saturday, 8 March 2025, 6 p.m.
Since 2010 the FOTOGALERIE WIEN has put on an annual solo exhibition showcasing the work of a young, upcoming artist. This series of exhibitions, SOLO, functions as a platform and springboard for artists who are at the beginning of their career but who already have an extensive body of work that we want to present to a wider public. The aim is to achieve a sustainable level of public presence for the chosen artist and includes helping to organize cooperations and touring shows.
We are pleased to present the work of the artist Anahita Asadifar, who was born in Isfahan/Iran and lives and works in Vienna.
Yet all we inherit will dissolve into the air
We have definitely crossed the threshold of the twenty-first century and are dealing with a new hazardous environment; how do politics, art and sex enter into it, how do they disrupt the current, brutal mutations of capital? This overly general
question could be less banal than it seems, since its signifiers may actually have been done away with, replaced by those of morality, art activism, and gender. The crux of Anahita Asadifar’s work is that it holds on to the first question whilst confronting the dilemmas that have led to its reformulations. In short, it rehearses the “here and now” through a few uncharted geographical links, generational gaps, choreographic rendezvous, favoring improbable but precise artistic “updates” of experience over the algorithmic fatalities (and boredoms) of contemporary discourses on the social value of art.
Dreams of insomnia: such is the stuff this art is made of. Its shifting fabric of images, writing, dance, music, machines, speech, bodies, personae, displays a slapdash, edgy, almost hallucinatory wakefulness. It borrows from surrealism; but
rather than suspending the difference between reality and dream, it emphasizes the discontinuities arising out of our growing “incapacity to sleep”. Much of the works are linked to entertainment or communication venues, high and low: a thousand-headed lyrical choir wall sings a folklore lullaby from Iran in an opera-trained voice. Vision goes “cosmic” in a nocturnal mix of urban park and war images synced with Tiny Tim’s parody celebration of ecological catastrophe. A musical television show is hosted by Judy Garland, with guest stars Walter Benjamin and Sylvia Wynter.
There is a quantum of method to these explorations: their productive matrix is montage, their salient feature theatralization, their muse the protean versatility of technology. But their multiple trajectories branch off, wriggling through the holes and ruptures of their own method rather than following it. Together, they develop aggregate constellations of singular works, whose elements migrate from one piece to the other. This show highlights the strange ways in which Anahita Asadifar’s anachronical remixes make use of the “uselessness” of art.
(text by Antonia Birnbaum)